Greta Garbo and Jim Henson - 18 May 1990

I was sitting in a hotel room in San Francisco one day last week, surrounded by a litter of newspaper cuttings to remind me that California, of all the states, is the one that pushes more initiatives in the problems that plague us, from Aids to environmental action, from smog prevention, children’s day care to banning smoking in public cases, drug treatment, bilingual education for the shoals of immigrants pouring in from the Far East and Mexico – in California they must, in some places, print ballot forms in 34 languages.

And on and on, when one of my oldest friends dropped in on me and after a little while said, "I suppose you did a memorable talk on Garbo". I said, "No, I didn’t touch her".

He was surprised at least, as I think most other members of our generation would have been to whom Greta Garbo is the most vivid motion-picture presence of the 1930s and had turned, to coin a phrase, into a legend.

But when she died, my instant reflex was to recall a sentence of Max Beerbohm, who sometime around the turn of the century, when he had taken over the theatre criticism from Bernard Shaw in the Saturday review, wrote about the exquisite, the all-too-familiar tedium of old men rhapsodising about the talents and minds we had ever seen.

I suffered from this in my boyhood when my sainted father, from the most generous and well-meaning motives, went on about the hypnotic face of Henry Irving, the fragile beauty of Ellen Terry and even, I remember, assured me there never would be another human voice in opera or in concert to compare with Sir Charles Santley.

Unfortunately, at some point I acquired a gramophone record of Santley. The record, which I still own in some catacomb of a closet, was made alas, at the end of his life, when there issued from the scratching grooves a faltering wail, as of a ghost in a school play. So much for the incomparable Santley.

Of course you can say that movie stars are luckier than theatre stars, in that the making of a movie is, in itself, an act of preservation. Made in the first place for the contemporary audience, but also there to pass on and be seen in its one and only original form for generations to come. So that you could say nobody, however aged, need fear that the young will be oblivious of the talent you are talking about.

Television has compounded this advantage by assuring that the movies of seven or eight decades will be seen long after they are likely to be revived in any theatre other than something called, the Museum of the Moving Image.

However, to accept this as an advantage, as a permanent blessed link, between the generations you have also to assume that the young make a habit of watching old movies on television. The most comprehensive survey I know show they do not, that only the tiniest minority of people under 50 choose to watch the movies of the 1930s and '40s and '50s.

I took up the fame of Garbo with a woman friend, practically a surrogate daughter of ours, she is 54. She was impressed but baffled by the page-long obituary of Garbo in the New York Times. She said, "You know, I don’t think I ever saw one of her movies". Understandable – Garbo’s last film was made 48 years ago, when this woman was five years of age.

And there is an English friend of mine in New York in his late 40s who is a ravenous addict of television from baseball and news documentaries, the history of the First World War, the history of the cockroach, and lashings of old movies.

But, I discovered, that to him old movies are ones he had seen or hadn’t caught in the late '60s or '70s. Last summer both of these lively youngsters – God help me, I suppose I ought to call them middle-aged – were staying with us down on Long Island and one evening I put on, for their joy and amazement, a tape of what the late Leslie Halliwell called the classic of American sophisticated comedy.

It was Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble In Paradise. They both loved it and I myself marvelled that a comedy, which tends to date quicker than anything, had retained after more than 50 years, its original charm and quicksilver mischief. I was also relieved that we hadn’t subjected tender youth into one of our ancient enthusiasms.

Then we discussed the players – who were these people, they wanted to know. Had they been famous in their day? Where they now? Well, I calculated that C Aubrey Smith would now be 126, Herbert Marshall 100 next week. They had never seen or heard of them, or of Charlie Ruggles, Edward Everett Horton, Kay Francis, the enchanting Miriam Hopkins, horrors – 98 this year.

Later, we took up the matter, the fame and beauty of Greta Garbo with these and other youngsters in their early 50s. They were divided about her beauty, some thinking her, with her spectral gloom and her thin, pencilled eyebrows, more bizarre than beautiful.

The Englishman thought, yes she was beautiful, in an old-fashioned way, but, they agreed on one thing – her films could not be taken seriously. Camille, Anna Karenina (to me, Garbo at her peak) were faintly ridiculous. Why? Then it came clear.

The generation gap, which, because it separates two different views of life, can never be spanned, they confessed that the whole idea of the femme fatale and its slavish presentation in the movies from Theda Bara (ever hear of her?) to Garbo, made them giggle.

Giggle at Garbo? Yes, as I could never do anything but giggle when my father took me to see the Carl Rosa Opera Company in such – poignant to him – dramas as Traviata and Rigoletto.

This alarming discovery of some views of life, attitudes, romantic conventions, that never can be shared between crabbed age and youth was reinforced once for all last summer when, up in Vermont, I was offered a jaunt to an ice-cream orgy with one of my grandsons and his friends. They were all around 17, 18.

On the way back, singing in the car, and high on sugar and the caffeine from the chocolate sauce, they fell to discussing their favourite movie stars. I had never heard of any of them. When, out of elementary courtesy, they included me in the game I was quick enough to edit out of my memory, such long-forgotten greybeards as Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Rita Hayworth.

I suggested that Robert Redford might be a popular candidate, and they howled with rude joy. Redford, my grandson screamed, he must be in his 60s. I learned then that the biggest box office star, not of this year, or last, but of the 1980s, was Kim Basinger, Bassinger, Baysinger... whatever. Enough.

It had never occurred to me till then that with movies, as with political characters and heroes, we are all victims of what I call the twilight zone through which in our youth we all stumble. Names, too late for the history books, too early for personal recognition.

But now, this week, a truly immense figure died, a giant of entertainment and, you might say, a world educational pioneer whose creations, if not his name, are known to four generations – Jim Henson, the supreme puppeteer of television who created the characters for Sesame Street and taught the children of 80 nations to spell without tears.

And, through the transference of these characters to the Muppets, provoked several generations in many countries, to chuckle and weep over the antics of Kermit the Frog and his wild companions.

Jim Henson died suddenly in New York at the shockingly young age of 53. Last week, he was as sprightly as ever, he developed, in 24 hours, a rare and powerful form of pneumonia and was dead the day after he entered the hospital.

He was a Mississippian who moved to Washington when his father went into government. He made a puppet in his freshman year in college, and started a five-minute late-night television show. He needed another freshman – freshwoman – to help with the puppets and she joined him, first with the puppets and then in holy matrimony.

He was only 19 when he built the frog called Kermit. He put him into commercials and then very soon started Sesame Street. Twenty-four years ago he introduced the Muppets – Kermit, Oscar the Grouch, Bird, Big Bird, the Cookie Monster and, with the regal appearance of Miss Piggy, the Muppets turned into a part of universal folk law.

I met him once, a gentle affable man, he asked my permission to introduce the warbling monstrous character sitting in a wing chair – a parody, he admitted of my own, Sunday-night role on American public television, as the host of a running series of British dramas called Masterpiece Theatre.

Before he could catch his breath I said yes and to this day, young children sidle up to me on the streets, in airports, or are reluctantly pushed by mothers, and they say, wide-eyed, are you Alistair Cookie, the Cookie monster? "Nobody else," I say. They either break into a giggle or run shrieking for their lives.

Perhaps my enthusiasm, and sorrow, for Jim Henson bears a touch of selfish gratitude that he guaranteed me, years from now, when I have crumbled, a slight hold on the affections of middle-aged people who will never have heard of me but will recall with joy, or terror, the Cookie Monster, host of Monsterpiece Theatre.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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